Microsoft Office 365 is an incredibly robust collection of tools that enterprises of all sizes can leverage. However, managing Microsoft Office 365 isn’t always easy. There are several plans to choose from, dozens of apps and features to learn, and various ways to license the software to consider. Dealing with “a dump truck full of licenses” can be frustrating—no matter how good and helpful the software is.
Microsoft Teams can help organizations simplify their use of Office 365 by providing a suite of useful collaboration tools designed around Microsoft’s Office software. In this video, we discuss some of the difficulties of Microsoft Office 365, and how using Teams can help simplify things:
How Teams Simplifies Licensing with Office 365
One of the key issues when dealing with any subscription-based software model is managing your licenses. Because Microsoft Office 365 is delivered on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, that means managing licenses. Normally, your Office 365 license would come from a vendor separate from your collaboration tool—especially if you use software like Slack to communicate between team members.
However, Microsoft Teams comes with access to key Microsoft Office 365 apps such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The paid tiers of Teams also come with Office 365 features like OneDrive file storing and sharing, SharePoint Online, Yammer, Planner, Outlook, and others.
So, instead of having to license separately for different productivity and collaboration tool software, you can instead deal with a single vendor with a single payment.
How Teams Encourages More Efficient Collaboration
In the video, Microsoft Office 365 is likened to a “giant web of products and features.” This analogy holds true—there are endless combinations of Office 365 licenses and Microsoft Surface hardware to run the subscription-based software on. There are so many unique combinations of products and features to learn that no one person can be expected to master them all. This can make collaboration complicated.
However, with Microsoft Teams, this is virtually a non-issue. Teams allows people who are in different parts of the world to share and collaborate on files in real-time without having to worry about file locks, file compatibility issues, and other challenges. Users can simply upload the document into the appropriate discussion on Teams, open it up, and start collaborating immediately.
This can be a game-changer for business collaboration. By allowing people to work together on a file in real-time without having to worry about compatibility issues, Teams makes collaboration more reliable and efficient.
How Teams Simplifies Using Office 365
In the video, there’s a reference made to a common scene in military movies: A fresh recruit shows up on the battlefield laden down with a ton of gear, only for one of the more experienced guys to look over his kit and start tossing out all the extra stuff the greenhorn doesn’t need. Without the excess crud weighing them down, the rookie can perform better without getting exhausted.
Microsoft Office 365 provides a lot of tools for people to use and learn—far too much for most people to do so comfortably. Normally, an expert user in the organization would be the one to sit a new user down and tell them which Office 365 apps and tools would be the best to switch between for different things. Teams helps simplify things and alleviates the training burden on organizations by presenting users with an easy-to-learn set of core applications and features in a single place.
Have questions about Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Office 365, or other topics not answered in the video? Reach out to the Protected Trust team today to discuss our Teams Training program.
